Notes for the Fifth Lecture

SERIALS AND OTHER DIVERSIONS

Hermeneutics

The interpretation of the bible and literary texts. Now often applied to film as well if the film is regarded as a text. Hermeneutics if generally used to arrive at a subtext although care must be taken in terms of reading in or reading out of the text.

While the History of Movies has concentrated on the narrative films, almost all programs contained many parts. There were often 2 films (possibly an A film and a B film)

A typical Saturday afternoon at a local movie theater often consisted of a double feature; cartoons, a newsreel, a chapter from the serial, a short and one or more cartoons. In some places in the 40’s admission was a coca cola bottle! The movies served as baby-sitter allowing parents to have something of a free day - rather inexpensively

These "small" forms of films are often overlooked by films studies scholars. In part they played a small role in the film business. Few people went to the “movies” to see the cartoons, coming attractions or newsreels. Of all these the serials (and certainly the later were more likely to draw an audience or help decide whether to go or not. On same days, the theaters might run many cartoons which encouraged parents to send their children since these were not (like many movies) to cause the children to see materials that in those days was considered “too mature”,

In terms of the actual films, many of the "b" level films are often ignored by film scholars as being of little artistic merit, but in fact were sufficiently cheap to make and brought ina great deal of money in return to allow studios to make their more “acceptable” art films. Singing cowboy films were cheap to make and very popular as were B level mysteries and some horror films.

These films also provided a good training ground for actors and directors to try their talents. Both Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise were moved to “A” level films after showing their talents in the early Val Lewton films like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, Curse of the Cat People and Leopard Man

After many years some film scholars have taken second looks at some of these B level films and found them far more interesting than originally thought.

NEWSREELS

Newsreels were a constant source of information in ore TV days. It has been said that the Viet Nam war was the first war to be brought into eoples homes through news programs. Before that actual motion pictures of events could be seen only through the news reels in films
Newsreels were so common and known to all movie goers that when Welles used on to open Citizen Kane no one would have wondered what it was. reference Citizen Kane)
Its roots lie in 1896 Paris, France, when Société Pathé Frères was founded by Charles Pathé and his brothers, who pioneered the development of the moving image. Charles Pathé adopted the national emblem of France, the cockerel, as the trademark for his company. After the company, now called Compagnie Générale des Éstablissements Pathé Frère Phonographes & Cinématographes, invented the cinema newsreel with Pathé-Journal. French Pathé began its newsreel in 1908 and opened a newsreel office in Wardour Street, London in 1910.
In the 20th century It became the largest Film Equipment and production company in the world. As a reslut it wwas a prestigeous company to be involved with as a distributing company.
In December 1928, the French and British Pathé phonograph assets were sold to the British Columbia Graphophone Company. In July 1929, the assets of the American Pathé record company were merged into the newly formed American Record Corporation.[5] The Pathé and Pathé-Marconi labels and catalogue still survive, first as imprints of EMI and now currently EMI's successor Parlophone Records.
In the United States, beginning in 1914, the company built film production studios in Fort Lee and Jersey City, NJ, where their building still stands. The Heights, Jersey City produced the extremely successful serialised episodes called The Perils of Pauline. By 1918 Pathé had grown to the point where it was necessary to separate operations into two distinct divisions. With Emile Pathé as chief executive, Pathé Records dealt exclusively with phonographs and recordings while brother Charles managed Pathé-Cinéma which was responsible for film production, distribution, and exhibition.
Since then various companies have taken over parts of Pathe: Warner Borthers, Disney,20th Century Fox

There were, of course other distributing comapnies like Educational, but these were is terms of prestige seen as lower ranked comapnies,

SHORTS

Shorts typically ran from 10 minutes to about 30 minutes, Typically a Saturday matinee would include two feature films (alled a "double feature" and "A' and a "B" film or two "b" films; a travelogue; a comedy, one or more cartoons a chapter from a serial and a set of coming attractions.

Travelogues

(See Thomas Meehan's NY Times article "those-old-movie-travelogues-or-as-the-sun-sinks-slowly-in-the-west"
These traveloques were light documentaries no more usually than 10 miutes in length in which the audience was given a superficial tour of some country and its culture - usuallly in terms of its arts and crafts and senic beauty, The most famous were those of James A. FitzPatrick, who wrote, directed produced and often narrated> The films were always in color and known under the series name MGM distributed a series of his travel films under the umbrella titles "Fitzpatrick Traveltalks" and "The Voice of the Globe" when released by MGM, and with Paramount as "Vistavision Visits."

Speciaties

In addition to the travelogues there were "specialties" that were comedic.

The serial has its own interesting history. Serials began in the silent movie period. Initially, a serial was a set of stories around a given person or persons, much the way a television series is today where a character or characters (played by the same performers) have innumberable adventures, each broadcast is complete in itself. Some of the early silent serials like The Hazards of Helen were like that.The complete series ran 119 12 minute episodes, each a story in itself.In total, the Hazards of Helen ran some 23.8 hours!
Later the "cliff hanger" developed in which the story was divided into chapters, each one of which left a major character (often the lead) in a life threatening situation. Audiences would have to come back the next week to see how the endangered person escaped. Sometimes writers got people into situations they could not exticate themselves from in any logica way and s in the next chaoter they simply had escaped!

One of the most famous was The Perils of Pauline with Pearl White.

Like most of the cliff hangers, the stories were thin with lots of action and plenty of work for the stunt performers!

Of all the later serials, the three Flash Gordon serials (Flash Gordon, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars and Flash Gordon Conquors the Universe) may be the most popular.It starred Buster Crabbe an Olympic swimming medalist as "Flash". At the time it was made, the initial series was claimed to have cost over a million dollars making it the most expensive serial made at that point, Others have argued it was a little over $300,000.The series borrowed much of its sets and props and music from earlier films (especially the Universal horror films made my the same studio that made Flash Gordon) and much classical music that was out of copywrite like Liszt' Les Preludes and Wagner's Parsifal